Category Archives: human mind

The inner world

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Concealing a universal wisdom

Are you perhaps concealing a universal wisdom? And if so, how would you know?

Recently I read in a book that is substantially holier than me, about seeking God within. It made a commentary that this was the opposite of introspection. I agree, although there are other opposites of introspection too.

Introspection, as I see it, is looking into your own personality, or “soul with a name”. This is the person we call “I”, and we feel responsible for what this person does and says and, if we are extra serious, even what it thinks. So when we look at the thoughts we have or have had, and how we feel etc, that is introspection. It is looking at our conscious self, although it may have been less conscious than it could have been – that is what we are trying to correct, perhaps.

But the inner world does not only consist of this person, the “I”. There is a lot of activity in there. The subconscious is far larger than the conscious, at least for most of us. Nearly all of us. There may theoretically be some amazing people who are so enlightened and so thoroughly conscious that they occupy their entire brain, but I doubt there is one in each millennium, if there ever were any.

The popular view of the subconscious is roughly identical to Freud’s “Id”: The unfinished basement of our psychological house, where we hide all the things we don’t want to have in the daylight. Mostly sex, if Freud is to be believed, which he certainly shouldn’t be. While Freud was picking apart his patients’ dreams looking for sex symbols (because putting an umbrella in a suitcase is totally a graphic depiction of coitus), C.G. Jung noticed to his surprise that some of the dreams were strikingly similar to well known myths in other cultures, myths that were completely unknown to all but a few researchers in Europe. (This was before the age of the Internet. Today, anyone may have picked up anything. This means we could never have had a discovery like that in our age.)

Sometimes, Jung noticed, people would come across persons in their dreams or daydreams that were far wiser than themselves, although their wisdom was often coached in symbols or poetry that the dreamer had to unpack through a conscious effort. It was, in other words, voluntary (and not easy) to absorb the insights that already existed inside them. It was as if ordinary people had limited themselves to a small part of what they could really have been. Inside them were skills and insights and knowledge that they were not even aware they had.

This, incidentally, is the case also with some patients with “multiple personality syndrome”. In actual life, there is an unknown number of people who have multiple personalities but don’t seek medical treatments, because they get along fine with themselves, and find their multiplicity a strength rather than a weakness. Naturally they soon find out that almost everyone else think it is insane, so they don’t disclose it.

But even among those who do have problems with their multiple personalities (for instance one personality may refuse to share information with the rest, leaving blank spots in their memory, or actively try to hurt their relationships or even their bodies) – even in such cases, it is amazing how much the personalities can vary. They can have completely different skills, and in some cases they even have separate allergies! That sounds like a miracle, or the opposite of a miracle perhaps, whatever that is. But in most cases, the sum of the “alters”  is more than one normal person. In some cases, each personality can be pretty close to normal, and yet they are different, so it really is like there are different people sharing the same brain.

I mention this because you probably think that you are using your brain pretty well, and your subconscious is just a dusty basement with trash you’ve kicked downstairs and shut the door. Chances are there are skills and knowledge and abilities down there which are quite a match for what you have achieved in your waking life, unless you are somewhat of an overachiever. It may even be that some of your energy is spent on denying abilities you actually have: There is at least one documented example of a person who could not draw or paint, but after a brain damage began painting beautiful paintings. Not started learning to paint after the brain damage, but suddenly could do so. They had already had the skill but locked it in the basement. OK, here is an article with a long list of such people and a theory of how.

I know that during my first epoch of deep “emptiness” meditation, in my 20es, I began to be able to think in music. To this day it is pretty common that the “voices in my head” sing songs I have never heard before, either without words or with words in a known or unknown language. I don’t have the skill to write down the music, and I don’t plan to specialize that way, so it disappears after a while. It is no big deal: There will be new music later, probably. So far there has. But I think I would rather be me than to have a stroke or a crushing blow and become able to compose!

But as you can see, the subconscious is not really a corner of your mind. It is like a door that opens to some vastly larger place than your mind. At first it may seem like a mansion, then as a landscape, a planet, finally an expanding universe. There is no reason why the inner world should not be much larger than the visible universe: The possible connections in the human brain exceed the number of molecules in the known universe, or at least so I read when I was young. The thing is, perhaps it is not created by our brain at all? When we look out the window, there is frantic activity in the back of our brain, in the visual cortex. But we don’t usually assume that the brain actually creates the world we see outside our window. Why exactly do we assume that the brain creates all our subconscious content?

Well, what do I know. But it is a topic that would baffle you if you took it seriously. It is a bit like discovering that your wardrobe is a doorway to another world, isn’t it? ^_^ Of course, some of us like it here in the safe zone.

 

Speaking or being spoken

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“The road to refinement is difficult.” But you’ve made a great start just by shutting your mouths! Congrats!

In the first chapter of Meditations on the Tarot, our Unknown Friend mentions speech almost in passing (when talking about concentration or yoga as stilling the oscillations of the mental substance, or willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination). His point is that to most people, speaking is automatic. Not in the positive sense that you don’t need to think of how to move your tongue or your vocal cords, but in the negative sense that words just jump out of your mouth without a conscious decision to speak, much less exactly what to speak.

He says that the Pythagorean school prescribed five years of silence for beginners, or “hearers”. Only once they had learned fully how to be silent, could they be allowed to speak. At this time, it was judged that they were no longer just speaking automatically.

By default, there is an inner pressure to speak. The restless activity of the mind seeks an outlet. It is not so much that one has something to share with others, or even that one asks others for a favor.  Rather, there is speaking inside the head and it comes out. In the really bad cases, this is similar to how a baby excretes bodily wastes – it just happens, and the best one can do is clean up the mess afterwards. This is generally how children speak for many years after they have learned continence on the other end. Some people remain in this sad position throughout their lives.

Others – probably most, now that service is such a main source of employment – learn to “potty train” their mouth, so that they can hold back the words that bubble up inside. It may require them to ball their fists in their pockets or behind their back where the customer cannot see it, but then as soon as the source of their agitation is out of earshot, it all comes out.

This kind of verbal excretion is mentioned by Jesus Christ, who says that it is not what goes in through the mouth that makes a human unclean, but what comes out through the mouth: Evil thoughts that come from the heart and pass through the mouth; these make a human unclean. We Christians call this Jesus Christ “our Lord”, but it actually does not come easy to us to obey him in this. Of course it does not, for as long as the evil thoughts (or at least “thoughtless words, which cut like swords”) bubble up inside, the pressure will just keep rising if we close our mouth. Silence of the mouth is a terrible fate if one has no way to achieve at least a modest degree of stillness of the heart.

Stillness of the heart, then, is required in order to truly speak, rather than being spoken by the pressure of words that bubble up from inside. Stillness of the heart is hard to achieve without some degree of solitude. In fact, it takes a lot of solitude for a long time, for most of us. It is not impossible to arrive at this stillness in a noisy, busy, crowded life; but it takes an inordinate amount of dedication and grace put together. To expect that God’s grace (or some other karmic benefit) will make up for the lack of outward quiet – when one has a choice of such quiet – is rather similar to jumping from the top of the temple spire, relying on God’s grace to not get hurt.

Of course, not everyone can live alone or should live alone, or in a monastery of silent monks or nuns. Sometimes you just have half an hour now and then, or perhaps Divine providence makes it so that you cannot sleep for a period at night, so that you then get a chance to still the waves of your mind and commune with the Light in the depths of your heart.

But first and foremost we need to become aware of the words we speak (or type, for those of us so inclined!) We need to choose self-reflection: What did I just say? Where came these words from, did I really mean to say this? We need to reflect on our spoken words for sure if we shall ever hope to reflect on our thoughts.

To the religious, self-reflection saves from Hell; for it is written: “Pay attention to yourself and the teaching,  keep doing this; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you.” (The phrasing in your particular religion will vary, but not the fact, surely.) But even if you are not religious in the traditional sense, surely you have a higher aspiration, or you would not be here reading this. You are not like cats or dogs, who make sounds merely to scare enemies, attract mates, evoke sympathy and obtain food.

I have had the opportunity for transformation in this regard that only a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity has ever had in all of history. If I have achieved some degree of awareness and choice of speech, it is no more than is required under such circumstances. In truth, almost certainly less. So I am not here as a teacher to instruct you, but as a fellow aspirant to encourage you in our shared hope and aspiration. May my words have been acceptable.

 

Mansplaining mansplained

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The man knows the reason, and he is not afraid to tell you, using words that even your small brain can understand.

If you wander into the oddly colored outskirts of the Internet, you may come across weird words like “mansplaining”. This is at its core the need we men have to explain things in detail to women who know those things better than we do. The word is slowly catching on and getting a wider definition – men can now mansplain to men and even some women can mansplain. This is probably because we do not have a good word that means the exact opposite of “shut up, listen, and learn”.

Actually we don’t have a word for “shut up, listen and learn” either, I think. If we could verb “meekness”, it would at least be in the same neighborhood. It is no big surprise then that meekness is not seen as a great manly virtue among the worldly. Even though arguably, as the ancients said, the greatest victory is over oneself.

I don’t think mansplaining is a secret weapon of the patriarchy, or even that men are too stupid to realize we are stupid. Rather, I suspect that it has to do with reproduction. I think it serves a similar purpose as the peacock’s tail, to impress the chicks. And even when it fails to impress – as it often does these days when women have longer education than men – at least it leaves them in no doubt as to your gender.

Likewise there is a tendency among women who like a man, to play along with his self-styled omniscience. This again encourages the man and puffs him up in his self-importance. And due to the roots in reproduction, this process can be particularly pleasurable. This is something that I remember the elders of the Christian Church warned against. Those men who had come to a life in which they were qualified to teach others and give advice, should take particular care to not needlessly spend their time advising women in matters where they might as well ask another woman, and in particular not alone.  Stories from other denominations have borne this out; it is a slippery slope.

But even apart from that, the ego has a tendency to eat and grow strong from such activity. It requires an effort – or at best lifelong vigilance – to shut up, listen and learn.

 

75% control?

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“You can sit there and reflect on what you did!” That sounds like a good idea, but you may sometimes find that it was actually mind parasites (complexes) that influenced you to do it. That is not exactly an excuse – life can be reclaimed from those. But first we have to throw the light of awareness on them.

Recently I was walking and outlining an entry in my head about religion vs mind parasites. By a strange coincidence, this week’s broadcast of Happy Science on Air featured an answer by Ryuoho Okawa about destiny and the degree to which one is in control of one’s own life. Okawa answered that one controls about half of one’s life through the choices one makes. A quarter is decided before we are born. And the fourth quarter is decided by spiritual influences, good or bad. So by religious training the part of your life that you can control goes up from 50 to 75%.

That is what Ryuho Okawa says. But he also occasionally says that he is God and comes from Venus, so you may want to call a couple more witnesses before making your final decision.

I think even 50% is actually very rare in typical humans. I mean, I suppose technically you can make that many decisions if you are wide awake while living your life. And there are a number of secular philosophers who just may have lived that way even without religion as we usually think of it. So I suppose the potential exists. And it could be argued that to not choose is also a choice, although I wonder how accurate that is if people don’t even KNOW that they have a choice.

Making people aware that they have a choice, that reality is not as small and bland as it sometimes looks, is one of my major aspirations in life. But I wonder if I should be more selective about it. A number of my friends did wake up a bit and began to think for themselves. They went on to think wrongly and went astray, as in causing suffering for themselves and others. But I guess at least they were not bored. Still, I sometimes wonder if this restriction on seeing the freedom, this “sleep”, may have been put upon people for their own protection.

And yet, to me this is important. Personal growth, as I see it, is the growth of the conscious, reflecting self at the cost of the mind parasites or rote habits. By habits I don’t only mean outward actions, but habits of thought and even habits of seeing the world in a particular manner.  These are usually programmed into us early in life by family, friends, teachers and the wider culture.

This does not mean that everything we learn is wrong, of course! But in a manner of speaking it does not really become ours until we consciously observe it and reflect on it. A good habit may also exist for many years and we have not really made it a part of ourselves because we don’t see what we are doing.

But often the things we do and think and see are not a conscious expression of ourselves, but the doings of free agents of the mindscape, mind parasites or (if we are lucky) symbiotes, and snippets of brain software that runs on its own, somewhat like the Android programs that don’t close down properly and drain the batteries of your smartphone unless you have Juice Defender installed. They may have been useful at some point in the past but keep running in the background without us being aware of them. Most Windows machines also tend to run gradually slower as all kinds of junk builds up, mostly harmless (although the occasional virus or worm may also be there) but not useful, and not really wanted. We just don’t notice it. So it is no miracle that the brain has the same problem, and probably more so, since some of this junk has built up for generations! “That’s the way we do it around here.”

So sometimes we wake up and find that we live in a corner of our own brain, while most of it is dedicated to things we don’t exactly hate (although that may also happen) but just don’t recognize as us.

Whether we – the person – actually exists? That is a deeper question that I don’t think we should try to answer until we have a thorough understanding of how the rest of our mindscape looks, from a long time of direct observation. I will just briefly mention it: The body may look from outside as if it is mostly “one piece”, but inside it is actually made up of many different organs, and these again are often made of smaller structures, which again are made of tissues of myriad cells. And even the cells again are made up of smaller parts and so on. So does that mean the body does not exist?  That is clearly wrong too, if you mean that there is nothing there. It does not disappear and is not reduced by our knowing. Seen from one perspective the body remains, but seen in another way we see many other things also in its place. It is no surprise if the psyche is similar.

It may seem like a horrible idea to expand the conscious “I”, if we want to get rid of it later. But consider the alternative: Letting the brain fall prey to the mind parasites for as long as we “live” – I cannot even fully use the word live, in the sense of living a human life, if we are run by mind parasites most of the time in most of the ways. So dismantling these is a priority. But then we also have to dismantle our pride and our sense of being the greatest and most important thing in the universe. These things can happen in parallel. But until there is some room in the chaotic mindscape for clarity, we cannot really begin to see ourselves.

I constantly see people who have very little control of themselves, although they may think so. The parasites are in charge. And one of these people has been me. It surely still is, in the many areas where I have still not reflected on myself in an objective way.

 

“Humans with breasts”

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“Men… As long as they see huge breasts, they don’t care who it is?” That is actually true on one level, but far from true on another level.

When I make my way through the city, my peripheral vision just registers people as vaguely humanoid shapes when I don’t look directly at them. But sometimes, and that included today, some of them appear as vaguely humanoid shapes with breasts. That is to say, even though I don’t look at them directly, some kind of breast detection module of my brain still manages to notice, even while I am thinking of something else. And I usually am – I am long past the years where a man would walk through the city thinking about breasts. Well, this kind of man at least. Your man may vary.

So we could say that on this level, which is close to actual instinct and operates automatically, it is true that a man does not care who it is. Important details like breasts and birthing hips are registered by what we may imagine as an separate circuitry of the brain, to use the computer metaphor.

It is a completely different thing to obsess over it. Seriously guys? It is a completely different thing unless you are lacking most of your brain, or it is there making your head heavy but it is not working.

This awareness that some humans have breasts is like level one out of five:

1) Aware

2) Considering

3) Willing

4) Wanting

5) Decided

In order for the species to continue into another generation, at least one of the parents have to reach level 5, and ideally the other should be from 3 upward if we don’t want to have a criminal case on our hands.

So in that regard, being simply aware of the physical differences between the sexes is pretty far from getting it on. It is certainly in itself no threat do my celibacy. Your celibacy may vary, depending on whether you are a complete idiot with bad habits. In which case your celibacy is probably not voluntary. Long may it last anyway.

That said, there certainly are situations already in this life where it would be preferably to simply see the other person as a human, and not as a human with breasts (or with the thing women become aware of, as I am pretty sure they also are aware of the opposite sex).

I am cautiously disagreeing with the Norwegian government when it decided to mandate by law that corporations needed to have at least 40% board members of each sex. (In Norwegian we have the same word for sex and gender, so I am not sure what they do about gay and lesbian directors. Do they qualify as 40% of each?) While I am sure that women have many ideas they can contribute in the boardroom, I am also certain that men are likely to lose some of their ideas, and power of thought in general, in the presence of a multitude of women.

In America I hear they are taking this idea even further, and writing laws that mandate 50% men and 50% women in each marriage. Well, I suppose that is taking things to its logical conclusion. An extreme case of government meddling in people’s affairs. You start in the boardroom and end in the bedroom. Darned leftists can never get enough government!

In Heaven we won’t notice people’s breasts. (Or lack thereof.) Or that’s what the voice in my heart tells me. In that regard, I am in Heaven pretty often. But not yet all the time.

 

The terrorists have already won.

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By all means take sensible precautions. And then ride off into the sunset.

My younger online friend Bjørn Stærk has a 9/11 article in a Norwegian publication. As usual his words are filled with wisdom. If I were to extract the essence, he says that there happens very much in the world. We should look around and not let random groups of people decide our reality, whether they be terrorists or pundits. They know not what they do. The world is much more than this, and if we keep getting led by the blind, we will be blindsided again and again forever.

***

Looking at the USA, I think my headline is justified. The fragile safety was shattered, seemingly forever, and panic was made into an institution. Even now, people are being harassed by halfway-police deriving their power from that event.  And while trillions are spent chasing shadows, more people die in a day – possibly in an hour – from TV, couch and fast food, than from all terror attacks in living memory. Where are the trillions for your war on couches? Your war on fast food? Your war on passive TV consumption?

If you have nothing more to learn from 9/11, let it go. Good people are dying every day. One of those days it will be you. Don’t let a day go by without learning something, without seeing something with fresh eyes, without being alive at least for a brief moment, looking around, realizing: “I am here. This is now. I am alive in this world” before the habitual thoughts overwhelm you and sweep you away again.

 

Literacies!

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Yes you should! Read them all, even if you have to jump to reach the ones at the top shelf! ^_^

If you read this journal, you are obviously not illiterate. But how literate are you? Well, if you read my previous entry about walking, it was worthy of 9th grade according to this handy readability calculator. Hopefully you graduated from there at some point and haven’t lost too much of your skills…

I am pleasantly surprised that my latest entries seem to be this readable. I suppose if I went into the really esoteric material, it would be harder to read. Certainly that seems to be the case with most of the books I have bought lately, mostly on topics of religion and value philosophies.  With the notable exception of Ryuho Okawa, it seems people feel the urge to use strange words when speaking about such topics, or else use common words in new ways. I guess this can be useful to keep things exact. The more clearly you understand something, the more exact you can be. And if something is very valuable to you, you want others to see it exactly as it is.

But if you see something in the distance, it is only natural that it is hazy. So if I try to explain something to people who are still far away from it, I should probably keep it simple. Should you really need college education to understand how the body works, or the mind, or the Heavenly Realm of Light? Perhaps, if you want to get all the details. But I don’t even have all the details myself. And in any case, I wouldn’t write for experts in a place like this.

***

Even so, there are many 9th graders who can’t read at a 9th grade level, as I am sure you have noticed. For that matter, there are many adults who can’t.  I guess it is more of an ideal than a requirement?

There are many reasons why people can’t read well. It could just be that they are stupid, as we used to say in an simpler age: They don’t have much processing power in their brain, compared to others. Whether we like it or not, this is a resource that is not given equally to all. And reading is not a function you need to survive in the wild, so it is not an instinct in humans. Perhaps if we were to live in civilization for millions of years, speech and reading and writing might become full instincts? If I write a science fiction story about such a species, I may consider it. But in the real world, reading is not the first thing your brain will devote itself to.

But even if you are smart, there could be specific problems with a small part of your mind, or your eyes, or even the muscles that control the small movements of your eyes; any of these could make it hard to read well, even if you are a fast thinker. For instance, I can read while standing up, or sitting in a bus on a bumpy road, or even while walking. This is not due to superior thinking but the tiny muscles that control my eyes. Of course it helps to be able to guess things from context so you don’t have to move your eyes so often, but without good control of those tiny muscles it gets much harder to read. Someone who is not blessed with good eye muscles will have a hard time reading unless he is sitting at a table or some such ideal place.

There are many people who can read well, if you ask them to read a text out loud. But if you ask them later to explain it in their own words, they cannot. They may be able to mention names or numbers from the text, but they cannot tell you what they learned and how it connects to other things they know. This could be because they learned to read as an outward skill, and were graded or praised based on whether they could read fluently, or remember names and numbers. They may not be stupid, but they never got into the habit of thinking about what they read while reading. Unless your mind is on the content, rather than the performance of the skill, you will have a hard time understanding and keeping what you have read. This is particularly important in textbooks and articles. The human mind is naturally good at stories, so it is easier to get something out of these even if you are not used to bind your text to you with thoughts or steadfast observation.

Reading tends to make you better at reading. It will not magically solve any medical conditions that make reading hard, of course. But within your potential, you can grow with practice. (As in all other things, I guess.) You may think that reading fantasy novels will do more harm than good to your future understanding of college textbooks, but that is not so (unless perhaps you are already an intellectual).

In fact, the example is taken from my own life. English is my third language. I learned the basics in school, but it was reading paperbacks that gave me a larger active vocabulary than most Americans. In particular authors who loved the English language, such as Piers Anthony, Stephen Donaldson and later Edgar Rice Burroughs.  They extended, expanded and enhanced my vocabulary and grammar. Now when I meet a rare word or an old-fashioned turn of phrase, I don’t need to break my concentration to figure it out.

Be that as it may, I am still not the grandmaster of literacy. Reading English more than a century old or so, for instance, slows me down. And there are people who write such flowery and convoluted language, it gives even me pause. Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes, I suspect, it is just their way of thinking.

But as for my own writing, I do not aim it at the barely literate. I may write for them if asked to, but I have no faith that they would find my journal in the forest of blinking and colorful advertising that the Internet has now become. So I write for those who read, enjoy reading, and keep reading. And for them, I hope my words shall be readable enough. For some of the things of which I write are not so simple to believe, since we have been taught otherwise from an early age.  But that is not for today. For now, let this be enough.

 

 

Toddlers and dreams

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“It is scary and dark out, and there are aliens…” In your dreams, young lady!

On the bus yesterday, there was a particularly loud toddler. I was a little irritated by the loud screams for a short while, but reflected on myself and noticed something. The way the toddler goes through intense emotions seemingly at random, or sparked by small impulses that cause extreme reactions. It is a lot like dreams, is it not?

I know some people, especially with old age, begin to dream so prosaic dreams that they cannot in the end tell them from real life. Such as the old man who naps after dinner and snores loudly for quite a while, then assures everyone that he did not sleep, he was just thinking with his eyes closed. To not be able to tell your dreams from your thinking, I am not sure whether that says most about your dreams or about your thinking… but at least when we are much younger, this is not the typical dream.

Even at my age, at over 50, I often experience stark fear during my first dream of the night. Whenever I can remember one of those, it is usually about some immediate threat, like a car accident about to happen, or a thief, or big spiders, that kind of thing. In waking life, extreme and immediate danger is very rare. While an armed burglar may eventually take my life, it is very much less likely than dying from fat like so many Norwegians do, unless I keep up my exercise schedule.

At the end of the night, dreams of great pleasure are more common: Flying, sexual activities, or wielding magic. Again, not spectacularly realistic. Especially not the sex…

Anyway, what strikes me is that dreams express extreme feelings and may change suddenly,  just like the waking life of a toddler. Could it be that toddlers are actually living in a dream? That until they learn to impose narrative on their life, there is no “real world” as we know it? There is the self, and the (m)other, but they are both rather nebulous, and the world even more so. A cat is not extremely much more realistic than a monster. The laws of nature could suddenly change. And some small thing – or even just the passage of time – could turn triumph into tragedy, then disappear just as suddenly.

I wonder: How much does our toddlerhood continue in our subconscious? Or, opposite, how far does our narrative reach beyond the realm of speech? If we had to face the world without being able to tell ourselves what is real and not, what would the difference be between our daily life and our nightly dreams?

Working on happiness

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“My only wish is for her to be happy!” That is usually a good starting point – if it is serious, and not an excuse for doing dumb things. Some practice and self-reflection may be needed to get it right.

From time to time I wish there was some way to transfer happiness. It is not that I particularly want to be less happy, but there are people I consider friends (or nearly so) who occasionally seem quite unhappy. I don’t mean the kind of happiness you can transfer with a smile or a few cheerful words. That would not be enough in these cases. People who are chronically bored, or angry for reasons they either don’t quite know or think they can do nothing about, or who just find life meaningless and humans disappointing.

There are many conditions that fall under the umbrella of “unhappiness”. And there are many of them I can do little about. In the past, I would buy small things to my student friends:  Books, CDs, DVDs, perhaps clothes or stuff for the house. I hoped this would cheer them up, and I guess for a while it did. But now they earn more than I do, many of them, but they are still not happy. What can I do about it now?

The fact is, happiness is one of those things you can’t just transfer, it is like strength or health. If you are strong and someone else is weak, you can give them a helping hand, but you cannot give them your actual strength. At best you can teach them exercises that will make them strong, but chances are they already knew that but for various reasons never did them, or did not benefit as much from them as you.  (And of course, a lot of people give up if they don’t become as strong as you within a month or two.)

The same goes for health:  If you want to make others healthy, you have to encourage them to do their own healthy living. And even then it is not a sure thing. A few people may be born with weak health, and for some of the rest it may already be too late. But it is still the best we can do, set an example with our own healthy living. If any.

(On that note, I am back to quick walking an hour or more most days again, including this weekend. If a legendary lazy person like me can do it – and I call on my three brothers as witness to my extraordinary laziness – then it is hard to imagine who can not, unless they already have one foot in the grave and the other is amputated. Anyway, walking is not only good for your body but also for your psyche. It reduces stress and gives you time to defragment your brain.)

But basically, happiness is one of those things that work like that. You have to build up your own, because you cannot just take it from another. And that is a fact: You cannot take happiness from another. Obviously you cannot steal it, any happiness you gain from putting others down is sure to fly away faster than a bird on the window sill. But you cannot even receive it. Rumor has it that many people in America think their spouse will make them happy. I am sure there are joys to be had in marriage, but the deep happiness is not something that comes from another. Even if you think so, you are not looking closely enough. Other people may be part of a greater framework that supports your happiness, but the happiness itself must come from within. That is the nature of happiness. It is not something that is done to you.

So in the end, we both have to work on our happiness. There is no way around that.

But would you that, if you could? There are those who feel they should not be happy. Perhaps they have been told so in the past. Or perhaps they have been happy, but then something horrible happened, and they associate the sudden fall into tragedy with the happiness they had before. “If you are never happy, you can never lose your happiness.” And that is true enough, but it is hopeless truth. If you are always sick, you cannot lose your health, but it is better to be healthy even half the time than none of the time, right? It is like that with happiness too.

Unless you are very extraordinary, you will not be able to experience unbroken happiness for the rest of your life. There will be events that lend a tinge of sadness to your life for a while. You will not be ecstatically upbeat, at least, even if you generally wake up grateful each day. But even for an ordinary person, happiness can be built up, and start to take hold, take over more and more of your life. This is definitely the truth. A level of happiness that seemed extraordinary when you were young, may become the norm when you are 50. That is worth a bit of self-reflection and taking responsibility, don’t you think?

 

Sleep or meditation

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“As a result, the treated subject appeared to lose its sanity and disappeared.” Unfortunately, this also seems to happen to blogs where the owner takes up a practice of meditating for hours a day. It seems to work fine in moderation though. Well, at least for the not disappearing part, so far. For the rest, judge for yourself.

We humans, and most animals, seem to have been made to sleep. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day, diurnal animals sleep during the night. Humans seem to naturally sleep some 9 hours a night, although most of us can get by just fine on 8, 7.5 or even 7. Much less than that and the majority will start to experience negative side effects.  Some have trouble even on less than 8.

Since our furry friends also need sleep (and feathered and scaled ones too), it seems pretty obvious that this need is biological rather than psychological. I mean, you could tell someone that hunger is just a feeling, and he may believe you strongly enough to go on without eating for quite some while, but he would invariably fall ill after a while. It is the same with sleep, if not more so. Pretty much any healthy person can go a week without food (as long as they have water, at least!) but a week without sleep is virtually impossible to arrange, no matter how much you engage the person to keep them awake. And even should you succeed, most will turn clinically insane before the week is over.

So why then is it a scientific fact that some meditation gurus can get by on half as much sleep, or in extreme cases even less?  And that even while they sleep, they still remain self-aware at the very least? Is it a miracle, a divine intervention overruling the usual laws of nature?

Actually there is a more this-worldly explanation, not that this world is not a miracle if you look at it in a certain way. But anyway! When you meditate, your brain waves gradually become synchronized across most of your brain. This also happens during sleep (except for the intense dream sleep, also called REM sleep). We spend some time early in the night in such REM sleep, especially as children and then gradually less over the years. Likewise we also spend some time, especially at the start of the night, in deep slow-wave (“delta”) sleep.  But most of the night is taken up by theta and very low alpha sleep. And this is brainwaves we can also have while meditating.

Usually people spend their meditation time generating alpha waves. This corresponds to a state of quiet and relaxed awareness. The same frequencies appear naturally when we lie down and begin to relax toward sleep, if we don’t have insomnia. Actually, people who start meditating will have a tendency to fall asleep if they get too comfortable.  But for an experienced meditator it becomes easier to stay awake and aware during meditation, and eventually more aware throughout the day… and finally throughout the night, for a few. Those who are able to reliably meditate even during the deeper theta waves, will basically get much of their “sleep” while meditating. The body and the brain both relax, but they remain aware instead of their mind drifting through fragmentary dreams.

So you may say the distracting functions of the brain are asleep, but the awareness is not. This, I believe, is how it works. But anyway, it works, but you are unlikely to see much of it if you start meditating during your midlife crisis. It tends to take a couple decades to get that far even if you start while you are young.

***

What else appeared to me in this context was acceptance. I had this idea that a lot of our sleeping brain activity is about problems, things we struggle with, things we fear or hope for, things we can’t let go of. I know that my own dreams at the beginning of the night tends toward the nightmarish – criminals, accidents, huge spiders –  while late in morning the dreams are often erotic or social, or occasionally religious. So it is a subconscious – or at least unconscious – form of thinking that is more involved than thinking in words. A form of processing. Working through our fears and worries toward what we really wish for.

What if we become more accepting of reality? What if we pare down our worldly desires and our attachment, and thereby eventually our fears? Then the brain would simply not have the need to do a lot of processing of that kind, right? So that may also be another mechanism by which meditation and similar spiritual practices reduced the need for sleep. It may be a two-pronged attack, both psychological and biological.

***

Unfortunately for the topic, I cannot explore this in my personal life. I am not a guru or anything. I began meditating when I was fairly young – in my late teens if memory serves – and did so actively for a while. But I had some experiences that seemed supernatural, and decided to cut down on meditation to avoid this. So after that I meditated only when I felt an intense need for it, for the most part, until now in my middle age where I have experimented more systematically with meditation and brainwave entrainment. (They are not the same thing.)

It does seem from my experience that using deep brainwave entrainment (delta frequencies) does reduce the need for sleep a bit and generally makes me less sleepy during the daytime. But I have not tested using theta brainwave entrainment for several hours a day, to emulate the hours spent in theta each night. I am not sure I am motivated for it even now, even for the sake of science.  Perhaps you or I will come across the writings of some actual guru who can tell us from firsthand experience. I am perfectly happy to take this second- or even third-hand. At least for now. You never know who I will be in the future, if any.